Shortly after Pasternack did Mr. Calacanis show up and made his comments on how messed up SEO is and how useless. He became a bit more careful with his statements about SEO after he accepted the SEO challenge by Neil Patel who increased Mr.Calacanis blog traffic over 20% after only a few of his suggestions were implemented by Calacanis’ web developers.

Now did another prominent blogger take his bite out of the SEO industry, Mr. Robert Scoble from Scobleizer.com. He created a video series where he explained how Google is going to be crushed by Mahalo, Facebook and other social media projects and how the days for SEOs are numbered (once more). Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz (link fixed) took the time to check the statements made by Mr. Scoble and respond to them, one after another. See Rands post here. It also contains the references to the Scoble videos to which I will not link for SEO reasons.

I did not see Rands post in the track-backs of Scobles post where he refers to his three videos. I hope they will show up, because it would be a very bad, if a social media A-Lister like Mr. Scoble would demonstrate that he just talks the talk, but not means what he says. Keyword: “Conversation” with people. “Conversation” does not imply consensus Robert. Sorry, but those are the rules.

The only good and at the same time bad thing about all those attacks is the fact that they are always without any legs to walk on. There are undoubtedly issues in the SEO industry that are not resolved yet and not very pretty, but those attacks are never addressing those real issues. The comments made are always badly wrong and show how little the people who try to bash it actually know about SEO and search engines in general.

Who is coming next?

I do not know, but I am sure that there will be a next person and from what it seems will that person probably be as constructive and correct in his criticism like the previous three experts.

Carsten Cumbrowski has years of experience in Affiliate Marketing and knows both sides of the business as the Affiliate and Affiliate Manager. Carsten has over 10 years experience in Web Development and 20 years in programming and computers in general. He has a personal Internet Marketing Resources site at Cumbrowski.com.To learn more about Carsten, check out the "About Page" at his web site. For additional contact options see this page.

6 thoughts on “SEO Bashing : First Pasternack then Calacanis and Now Scoble”

The SEOmoz blog is a custom content management platform, Carsten – I’m not sure it’s capable of sending trackback pings to other weblogs.

If you ask me, Scoble was talking out his backside with that post which seemed to be more about trolling than any serious commentary. What backs this up is the lack of people who thought his ‘four years till Google death’ was actually feasible.

Those of us involved in the industry see things like the AdSense cottage industry, SEO, PPC as amplified issues. The fact of the matter is that an overwhelming amount of web users use Google because they are the best at what they do and because the brand is so strong.

How Scoble missed/overlooked/ignored that is worrying. I’m inclined to say that he was deliberately trolling in order to give Mahalo a bit more publicity. Calacanis couldn’t possibly have pulled it off – having already trolled the SEO industry a few months ago. Yet here were are again with virtually the same schpeil as before…

Assuming that all of this prognosticating were to take place in a vacuum, maybe Scoble would be onto something.

But since this isn’t a vacuum and since Google isn’t staffed by idiots who can’t see trends and react accordingly, both he and his comments are left looking as vacuous as .. well, a vacuum, funnily enough…

That puzzles me too. You would have thought that smart people like Jason or Robert should know better than this, but intelligence does not mean knowledgable. It takes both to make fundamental statements about something to be taken serious and plausible.

As intelligent person should you know that and refrain from making predictions and assessments of a subject you don’t know anything or only little about.

You can claim to know how to run the country without knowing much about domestic and international politics in your local bar and nobody will care about it, but you better avoid doing that on public television as representative of yourself and/or your business.

The SEOmoz blog is a custom content management platform, Carsten – I’m not sure it’s capable of sending trackback pings to other weblogs.

Thanks for the info Gerard. I thought they used WordPress and then made changes to it. Mhh.. They are SEO’s so it would be like leaving money on the table, if they don’t send trackback pings to the blogs they link to.

I also like trackbacks from a non-SEO perspective. I don’t know why Loren decided not to support trackbacks for SEJ, but I would like to see who writes about a post I wrote and what they say. I will find it out eventually, but not as fast as with a trackback where I could jump over and read it almost immediately.

Bashers one after another. Saw a post at ZDnet.com about the future of SEO industry. The author made a post about SEO can only last for the next five years. Who are these people to judge our industry? Search marketing has evolved throughout the years and has combined with other marketing techniques such as social bookmarking, video marketing, email marketing, podcast marketing. In my view, our industry will continue to change according to the evolution in the future.